1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a radio frequency front end testing technology, and in particular, to a radio frequency front end testing device and a radio frequency front end testing method for simplifying the test process.
2. Description of Related Art
In recent years, due to the burgeoning popularity of mobile devices, demands for mobile networks are increasing and the criteria, especially for the reliability and durability for various modules of mobile network devices, become higher as well. As the amount of RF-related components of the mobile device increases, the control system needs to use a plurality of interfaces to connect the RF-related components. However, controlling the different RF-related components can be simplified by using a standard bus interface.
The MIPI RFFE (RF Front end) is the specification of the bus interface for the mobile system to control the RF front end equipment, which is regulated by the MIPI Alliance. A master device of a MIPI RFFE can control up to 15 slave devices and each slave device has a different slave address, so that the master device of a MIPI RFFE can transmit commands to the specified slave device.
The master device of a MIPI RFFE mainly uses a clock signal line, a data signal line and of course a power signal line. In general, the slave device of a MIPI RFFE includes a clock signal line, a data signal line and a power signal line for being controlled by the master device of a MIPI RFFE.
However, in the aging test of the reliability test procedure, a certain amount of RFFE modules are randomly selected from each batch for aging 500 hours to 1000 hours. In a general aging test, at least 77 RFFE modules are selected from each batch for aging test. However, in conventional testing systems, the address every RFFE module used for test is the same. As each RFFE signal module can only control one RFFE module, each RFFE module has to connect to one RFFE signal module in an aging test.
Therefore, each RFFE module needs to connect to one RFFE signal module in an aging test, that is, 77 RFFE modules have to use 77 RFFE signal modules.
Due to the huge number and the expensive cost of the required RFFE signal modules (the cost of each RFFE signal module is NTD 20,000), the total cost of the RFFE signal modules used for every batch may exceed by tens of millions of NT dollars. Hence, manufacturers may be unable to afford to purchase a great deal of RFFE signal modules to conduct the aging test procedure. Although the testing control signal can be manually provided to each RFFE module, it is time-consuming and not cost-efficient.
Therefore, providing a radio frequency front end testing device to simplify the testing process has become an important issue in the art.